Shrink down a GIF by reducing its frames count

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To illustrate my previous post and keep images at a reasonable size, I had to shrink down the top GIF from 14Mb to 3.2Mb.

Usually, online GIF converters will provide the ability to lower down the image dimensions. Another solution to reduce its size is to simply skip some frames.

To do so, I used ImageMagick wrapped in the following script:

gif_framecount_reducer () { # args: $gif_path $frames_reduction_factor
    local orig_gif="${1?'Missing GIF filename parameter'}"
    local reduction_factor=${2?'Missing reduction factor parameter'}
    # Extracting the delays between each frames
    local orig_delay=$(gifsicle -I "$orig_gif" | sed -ne 's/.*delay \([0-9.]\+\)s/\1/p' | uniq)
    # Ensuring this delay is constant
    [ $(echo "$orig_delay" | wc -l) -ne 1 ] \
        && echo "Input GIF doesn't have a fixed framerate" >&2 \
        && return 1
    # Computing the current and new FPS
    local new_fps=$(echo "(1/$orig_delay)/$reduction_factor" | bc)
    # Exploding the animation into individual images in /var/tmp
    local tmp_frames_prefix="/var/tmp/${orig_gif%.*}_"
    convert "$orig_gif" -coalesce +adjoin "$tmp_frames_prefix%05d.gif"
    local frames_count=$(ls "$tmp_frames_prefix"*.gif | wc -l)
    # Creating a symlink for one frame every $reduction_factor
    local sel_frames_prefix="/var/tmp/sel_${orig_gif%.*}_"
    for i in $(seq 0 $reduction_factor $((frames_count-1))); do
        local suffix=$(printf "%05d.gif" $i)
        ln -s "$tmp_frames_prefix$suffix" "$sel_frames_prefix$suffix"
    done
    # Assembling the new animated GIF from the selected frames
    convert -delay $new_fps "$sel_frames_prefix"*.gif "${orig_gif%.*}_reduced_x${reduction_factor}.gif"
    # Cleaning up
    rm "$tmp_frames_prefix"*.gif "$sel_frames_prefix"*.gif
}

$ for i in {2..5}; do gif_framecount_reducer Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty.gif $i; done
$ ls -sh *.gif | sort -r
8.7M Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty.gif
4.7M Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty_reduced_x2.gif
3.2M Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty_reduced_x3.gif
2.4M Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty_reduced_x4.gif
1.9M Cloudberry-Kingdom-difficulty_reduced_x5.gif

There are the results:

This function also rely on the gifsicle command, that is dedicated to creating and editing GIFs. It can be more useful and reliable than ImageMagick identify to extract information. E.g. you can extract the frames count this way:

gifsicle $gif -I | sed -ne 's/.* \([0-9]\+\) images/\1/p'
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